On the heels of Expedia Worldwide president Scott Durchslag exiting the company in January, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi used words such as “unsatisfactory” to describe “the overall Expedia brand performance,” and “poorly” to characterize how airline ticket sales and vacation packages fared in the fourth quarter of 2011.

Expedia Inc.’s revenue increased 7% to $787.1 million on a 19% increase in hotel room nights in the fourth quarter, although a decrease in revenue per room night put a damper on things.

Adjusted EBITDA fell 4% in the quarter to $162.1 million, and content and technology costs, including monies allocated to the tech platform, rose 29% to $98.6 million.

Hotels.com and the Expedia hotel product have been migrated to the new tech platform, the air product will be on board by the end of the first quarter, but vacation packages aren’t expected to be transitioned “until the back half of 2012,” Khosrowshahi told financial analysts during the company’s fourth quarter conference call yesterday.

Khosrowshahi expressed confidence that the new platform will increase conversions and enable Expedia to innovate faster, but he conceded that the company has something to prove and “there are a lot of ifs at this point.” He said:

Listen, all other things being equal, when E3 is complete, I would expect to see room night growth accelerate for Expedia, not only standalone room nights but especially packaged room nights that have been a negative factor. And I would hope to see that in the second half of the year. Again, we haven’t done it. But that’s why we’re investing the way that we are on the technology side.

The company says subsidiary Hotels.com, which transitioned to the E3 technology platform in early 2010, “experienced healthy room night growth across all regions during the fourth quarter.”

Khosrowshahi added:

And Hotels.com has continued to maintain … high room night growth. And hopefully, with execution, we’d expect to see that continue on a go-forward basis. But again, we know that we have to prove that out to you. I think the Q4 room night number was really healthy, and I think it was really healthy without Expedia hitting on all cylinders. So if we can hit on all cylinders, we could see things get better. But those are a lot of ifs at this point.

There were bright spots in the earnings announcement.

Expedia is bullish on its 50-50 AirAsia joint venture, which chipped in with healthy room night and hotel revenue growth in the fourth quarter.

And, Expedia CFO Mark Okerstrom says the company is not feeling any impact from Booking.com’s share gains in the US market, where Expedia’s hotel share likewise is growing.

Financial analysts offered varying views about Expedia’s prospects following the earnings release.

Tom White, an analyst for Macquarie Capital, has a “neutral” rating on Expedia and wonders about the cost of the technology upgrades. White says:

The main question for the stock in our view is not whether the Expedia brand’s tech re-platforming will yield improved conversion rates but when and how much the initiative will ultimately cost. This limited visibility, coupled with the potential for y/y EBITDA declines in 1Q given EXPE’s increased seasonality post the TRIP spin is enough to keep us on the sidelines near-term despite EXPE’s appealing relative valuation. Add to this EXPE’s larger relative exposure to the slower-growth/supplier-friendly U.S. market, and we still view PCLN as the preferred way to play the secular shift of global travel bookings moving online.

And, Mark Mahaney, an analyst for Citi Investment Research & Analysis, also has a “neutral” rating on Expedia’s stock, but says the “soft” results for Expedia in the fourth quarter sets the company up for “an excellent 2013.”

Either way, with Booking.com growing its hotel business, Expedia has something to prove.

Or, if Groupon doesn’t seek to disintermediate Expedia, would Groupon want to bring in additional partners?

In Groupon’s first earnings call as a public company yesterday, CEO Andrew Mason said Groupon is “very happy with the progress” of Groupon Getaways, but is already “broadening” it from a sales perspective.

With travel an integral part of Groupon’s growth strategy, Mason said Groupon already sources a lot of the hotel deals in Groupon Getaways with its own travel sales force.

So if Groupon’s travel sales force is already striking direct relationships with hotels, why share the revenue with Expedia?

Groupon and Expedia launched Groupon Getaways last summer.

It’s a time-worn practice at Expedia, and also in travel and outside of travel: partner with a company, learn the business and then dump the partner.

“It seems to me that Groupon is being quite obvious about it,” says one travel industry insider, “and Expedia seems to be asleep at the switch.”

Groupon has been casting a wide net looking at various travel startups and they are interested in companies with hotel relationships, technology and a great management team.

No one is saying that is indeed Groupon’s wish, but the apparently increasing activity of Groupon’s own travel sales force raises questions.

Mason said Groupon Getaways is doing “well” with hotel sales, but over time Groupon could add new products and features.

Speaking to financial analysts, he declined to break out numbers for Groupon Getaways.

Asked about the costs of it, Mason said Groupon makes investments in commissions to win initial business, but “over time it lessens.”

In the fourth quarter of 2011, Groupon recorded a net loss of nearly $42.3 million compared with a net loss of $313.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2010.

Groupon’s revenue in the fourth quarter grew 194% to $506.5 million, the company stated.

But, at least I wasn’t the only one.

The death of William Shatner’s The Negotiator character stoked some memories.

It was April 2005 in the Norwalk, Connecticut, office of Priceline CEO Jeffery Boyd and he was explaining the company’s strategic shift from being primarily an opaque seller of merchant hotel inventory through its Name Your Own Price service into a full-fledged retailer of air, hotel and car inventory.

More than a year earlier Priceline had debuted airline tickets on a retail basis and now it was adding hotels and cars so it could take on the then-much larger online travel agencies, Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz.

At the time, Priceline crunched only about 13% of the gross bookings that Expedia did, and Boyd said that day that Travelocity’s and Orbitz’s gross bookings were about twice that of Priceline’s.

So, the smallest of the four was going to make its move to become a full-service OTA and play with the big boys and girls.

And, Boyd thought there was no reason there couldn’t be a Big Four instead of a Big Three.

It’s unclear how much Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz heeded the threat, but Boyd clearly laid out the blueprint: Priceline would become a full-service OTA and expand through organic growth and acquisitions.

“Retail airline tickets was a big piece of that,” said Boyd, referring to a growth spurt in 2004. “If the new product launch of hotels is anywhere near as successful, I would expect our business would gain share and continue to gain share as we have done historically.”

Priceline had already acquired Active Hotels, would scoop up Bookings B.V. in July 2005, and tack on Agoda a couple of years after that as the OTA engineered a Europe and Asia marketshare grab in hotels.

Back in April 2005, however, the other OTAs were not surprised or particularly concerned about Priceline getting into the retail hotel business.

After all, they were focused primarily on the merchant model for hotel sales and were bigger and badder.

Michelle Peluso, then-CEO of Travelocity, said it made sense for Priceline to expand beyond Name Your Own Price, but Travelocity would have advantages because it could count on the resources of parent-company Sabre.

And, an Expedia spokesman said the company preferred its multi-brand approach — Hotwire for opaque hotels and Expedia for merchant and published rates — to Priceline’s tack of stitching it all together.

The Expedia spokesman wondered whether Priceline’s retail offering would cannibalize its opaque hotels business.

Boyd said Priceline had initially been concerned when it launched retail air that it would dilute the company’s opaque air business, but it found retail air brought incremental bookings.

Fast-forward to 2012 and Priceline, riding its global hotel offering, has a $26.3 billion market cap compared with the recently TripAdvisor-less Expedia at $4.7 billion.

In 2005, did Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz see all this coming?

Perhaps even Priceline would have been hard-pressed to predict the depth of its success.

Were the three other OTAs complacent in the beginning?

Were they over-confident based on their parentage or were they reading their own press clippings too closely?

Priceline and others undoubtedly will learn from all of this online travel history.

They should be cautious and cognizant that they shouldn’t count out Expedia, which apparently has fixed up its global technology platform, and has allied itself with Groupon and boasts of an exclusive agreement with AirAsia.

Sometimes online travel history — or perhaps we should say mobile-travel or social-travel history — unfolds before your eyes and you don’t recognize it right away.

There are tons of travel startups which have outlined their strategies in the Tnooz TLabs Showcase.

Is there a travel startup out there laying out its battle plan, calmly articulating how it will survive and thrive, and we just can’t recognize it through all of the noise?

Many people didn’t take Priceline seriously, either.

The funds, which have come from an undisclosed source, will also be diverted to new and existing product development and Olery plans to unveil a new product at ITB in Berlin in March.

The company specialises in tools which monitor social media presence and what is being said online and engaging with customers.

The technology can also benchmark performance against rival businesses in the leisure and hospitality sector.

Olery was founded in 2010 and customers include InterContinental Hotels, Best Western and Dorint.

Among the functions of the new TripAdvisor Management Dashboard, which is being rolled out on the company’s global sites, is a feature which enables hotel owners to view a list of competitors’ properties most viewed by the consumers who are also accessing the property’s TripAdvisor page.

A free version of the TripAdvisor Management Dashboard is available today, the company says, and TripAdvisor Business Listings customers are to get an enhanced version “in the coming weeks.”

The new analytics services goes beyond keeping tab of competitors’ page views.

The free service documents a property’s number of TripAdvisor reviews, popularity ranking and TripAdvisor rating; a summary of reviews and comments; tallies on consumer- and business-submitted photos; and the numbers on which countries are producing the most visits to a property’s TripAdvisor page.

The free TripAdvisor Management Dashboard is available to anyone who has registered on TripAdvisor as a business representative of the hotel.

Business Listings’ customers get those features plus trends graphs and performance metrics, including how a property measures up against competitors.

A special offers recommendation tool is also part of the dashboard package for Business Listings subscribers.

Business Listings customers add their direct-contact information, including a website link, email address and telephone number, to their TripAdvisor property pages.

The introduction of the TripAdvisor Management Dashboard and analytics service is an attempt to provide new services to hoteliers and to prod deeper engagement with TripAdvisor.

Christine Petersen, president of TripAdvisor for Business, says the tools provide hotels with “the metrics they need to succeed on TripAdvisor.”

The Gold List sale is a three-week promotion with discounts of up to 40% offered at additional hotels every week but Jetsetter UK general manager Rob Deeming hopes it will act as a ‘blueprint’ for further deals.

“This is the type of partner that draws real benefit for us and they are interested in ways of driving more e-commerce from their website.”

Jetsetter unveiled its UK service to a database of about 50,000 in mid-September and Deeming says the database has since increased almost threefold.

He also says the company will continue to exploit opportunities in the higher standard hotel space where it feels it has established a niche.

“The flash deals sector is less crowded than people think and you don’t see too many pure-play travel players. The US has a more advanced version of flash deals but there still hasn’t been consolidation there.”

He adds that the company is not setting its sights on further expansion in Europe yet.

In December, rival flash deals service Secret Escapes announced a partnership with online lifestyle service Achica.

Rooms and More, which eventually will be integrated into Travelport’s Universal Desktop, is a travel agency site which looks in some ways like a typical metasearch site, although the agents don’t get shuffled off to the aggregator sites to complete their bookings. Travelport acquired hotel metasearch engine Sprice in May 2010, and it provides much of the foundation for Rooms and More.

Some 6,400 travel agents in 70 markets are currently using Rooms and More so it hardly is a major booking channel for Booking.com, Agoda and the Expedia Affiliate Network so far.

But, it is interesting to see how these hotel aggregators, along with the likes of Miki Travel, Hotels.com, Grupo TransHotel, Medhotels, Hostelworld and others are competing for travel agency bookings. Travelport has a dozen aggregators in Rooms and More, with about 18 others signed up for implementation.

Niklas Andreen, Travelport GDS’ group vice president, hospitality and partner marketing, estimates that Rooms and More has 200,000 to 300,000 of an estimated half a million hotels around the world in the system.

It is difficult to give a precise count of how many hotels are represented because the providers often have overlapping inventory, he says.

The hotel providers compete for travel agency bookings based on whether they offer pre-pay or post-pay models etc. and their varying commissions.

Travel agents search for hotels and then see an array of offers from the providers with divergent commission specified.

For example, today in the US market on Rooms and More, Miki Travel was offering 12% commission, TransHotel (12%), Expedia Affiliate Network (10%), Hotels.com (10%), Booking.com (5.5%), and Agoda (4.5%).

It is likely that a company such as Expedia, which deals in so much merchant hotel inventory, could afford to pay a higher commission than Booking.com, for instance, which largely deals in the retail or agency model.

Travelport negotiates the commissions, which are subject to change by market, timeframe, availability and other factors, with each provider.

All of this inventory is accessed through the Travelport Universal API, but the aggregators also compete against chain hotels offered through the Travelport GDS, which lists commissions ranging from 0% to 12%.

Agents select an inventory provider, which is the merchant of record, and then Travelport sends the credit card details to the aggregator, which confirms the bookings and sends a voucher to the agency or traveler. Travelport collects all the commissions for the agencies.

The user experience for the travel agent is similar to traditional metasearch, although all of the bookings take place within Rooms and More instead of on sites such as Expedia or Booking.com.

Andreen refers to the experience as “meta-book.”

Also along the lines of a consumer experience, travel agents using Rooms and More get access to consumer-written hotel reviews about each property from sites such as TripAdvisor, Yahoo Travel, AOL and others.

With some travel agents disparaging what they consider to be amateurish user-generated content, it is interesting to see many of them are accessing consumer reviews in Rooms and More.

Keith Harrison, global head of hospitality sales for Travelport, says agents often access the user reviews when the property or destination is unfamiliar.

And, Andreen says Travelport is in discussions with professional review providers to add them to Rooms and More, as well.

Note: The author took part in a Travelport-sponsored press event in Atlanta.

Their you’ve-got-a-lot-to-prove attitudes emerge as Room Key, a hotel metasearch site launched this week by founding US hotel chains Choice Hotels, Hilton Worldwide, Hyatt Hotels, InterContinental Hotels, Marriott and Wyndham, announced that Best Western has signed on as Room Key’s first commercial partner.

Best Western adds some 4,000 hotels to the party, which is a celebration of hotel website bookings and a flexing of their collective muscles in a bid to diminish the distribution power of the OTAs.

Jake Fuller, an analyst at Lazard Capital Markets, notes that similar efforts in the form of European site Andbook more than a decade ago and US site Travelweb a few years later both failed.

And, while Fuller believes Room Key is a larger threat to Expedia because of its relatively US-centric hotel business than to Priceline, his firm maintains a “buy rating” on both stocks.

Although Room Key is chain-driven, “the bulk of the rooms sold by Expedia and Priceline are independents and each offers a much better picture of the market,” Fuller says.

For example, Room Key was showing 23 hotels available in New York City while Expedia displayed 532 and Booking.com offered 390, Fuller says. Similarly, the London numbers were Room Key (24), Booking.com (1,199) and Expedia (970).

“Limited inventory could limit the appeal,” Fuller says of Room Key, adding:

While Roomkey.com does offer international hotels, it is focused on US travelers, with plans to roll out to other English-speaking markets in the future. Because chain inventory is thinner abroad, we do not see Roomkey.com as a real threat to Expedia or Priceline outside of the US.

Herman Leung, an analyst at Susquehanna International Group, concurs with Fuller that Room Key is more of a perceptual problem than a fundamental one for Priceline and Expedia.

“To be successful will require significant marketing dollars and significant commitment from all of these hoteliers, which I think will be a lot harder than they think it is,” Leung says.

Room Key is a “slight negative” to the OTAs, Leung argues, and he wonders if the chains will divert monies from their direct-marketing efforts into Room Key.

Alexa currently gives Room Key a global traffic rank of 20,841,200, and it would have to increase its ranking to be in the top 10 of travel websites with perhaps 30 million monthly unique visitors to put the heat on the OTAs, Leung says.

Expedia has long-term contracts in place with most, if not all, of the Room Key founders, and if one decides to limit the inventory it assigns to Expedia, then another will take advantage, Leung says.

“This is not an Orbitz,” which was founded by five major US airlines, Leung says, adding that the hotel industry is much more fragmented than the airline industry.

Conceding that Room Key “has far from a 100% certainty of success,” Brian Nowak, an analyst at Nomura Securities is more bullish on Room Key’s prospect than are Fuller and Leung.

“Given the initial US rollout, Expedia is the most directly threatened by this site as US hotels represent an estimated 35-40% of revenue,” Nowak says. “For Priceline, we estimate only about 15-20% of gross profit is from domestic hotels, although Room Key does pose a threat to Booking.com’s ability to gain significant US marketshare.”

Nowak believes that hotel chains participating in Room Key will present nonbookers with pop-up windows advertising Room Key as they leave the hotel websites.

“We estimate that this strategy has the potential to extend Room Key’s reach to over 13 million unique visitors, larger than all of the current OTAs’ traffic,” Nowak says.

Will that be the secret  weapon?

It’s seemingly a dubious proposition.

Expedia Inc. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi says the company has to take Google’s foray into travel “seriously,” but thinks Google Hotel Finder has potential benefits for Expedia because it is a more cost-effective channel and less competitive than paid search.

The competition is less acute in Google Hotel Finder because companies must have substantial supply to participate, Khosrowshahi says, adding that the hotel business is “turning into a scale game.”

“We participate in every way with Google because it is a big channel and a growing channel,” Khosrowshahi said January 5, in remarks at the Citi’s 22nd Annual Global Entertainment, Media and Telecommunications Conference in San Francisco.

About Google’s efforts in travel, including Google Hotel Finder and Google Flight Search, Khosrowshahi says as long as Google sticks to its pledge to remain a pure-play advertising company, “then we’ll be fine.”

On other fronts, Expedia sees substantial opportunities in international growth (international currently is 42% of revenue), mobile, social and flash sales.

For example, Groupon Getaways with Expedia is “a very profitable relationship and we are very excited about it,” Khosrowshahi says.

However, the jury is still out on Facebook, he adds, noting it is “too soon to tell” whether Facebook will be an effective marketing channel for Expedia, Khosrowshahi says.

Expedia is currently focusing on building an audience on Facebook and hopes to make it a transactional channel, he says.

“And we will worry about monetization three to five years from now.” Khosrowshahi says.

As is their habit, Expedia officials said very respectful things about Priceline and its Booking.com unit, which has the upper hand in global hotel sales.

Booking.com has built an excellent product focused on Google optimization, says Expedia CFO Mark Okerstrom, explaining Booking.com takes consumer questions from Google and “answers them better than anyone in the market.”

With a $1 trillion market opportunity, Okerstrom argued that Expedia doesn’t “bump up against Booking.com” because both companies are relatively small players given the size of the global hotel market.

In response to a question, Khosrowshahi aknowledged that Priceline’s overall margins are more attractive than Expedia’s and he characterized the differential as “structural”: Priceline is largely hotel-only with less hefty capital expenditures than full-service online travel agency Expedia.

Expedia’s new global technology platform will help bridge the gap by increasing conversions and enabling Expedia to be more cost-effective in paid search.

Khosrowshahi said Expedia.com plans on migrating flights to the new platform in the first quarter of 2012 and vacation packages will be “flipped over” in the second half of the year.

Hotels.com transitioned to the tech platform in the second quarter of 2010 and has notched 40% growth in gross bookings, he added.

Launched in June 2010 to much buzz and backed by Madrona Venture Group to the tune of $1.35 million initially, Off & Away posted a notice on its website that it is “closing its doors” and has been purchased by Lockerz, which is also based in Seattle and runs a retail site with social aspects.

Eleven of Off & Away’s 12 employees, including co-founders Doug Aley and Michael Walton, are transitioning to Lockerz, which purchased Off & Away’s core assets, but has no immediate plans to enter the travel sector. Aley is now chief of member experience at Lockerz and Walton is chief product officer.

Terms of the deal were not detailed, although Lockerz revealed in a financial filing December 6 that it completed a $4 million stock offering in connection with a “business combination transaction.”

The auction model, where users buy bids to secure a hotel or other deal, has taken its lumps of late with companies, such as Swoopo, BigDeal and now Off & Away, ceasing operations.

Retaining customers and getting scale have been the big problem with at least some of these businesses.

Off & Away seemed to have solved some of the retention issues by enabling unsuccessful bidders to book hotels on a retail basis, but that cut into the company’s margins, and scaling the business was slow and problematical.

Although Lockerz has no immediate plans to get into the travel business, Off & Away says that all bookings for future travel will be honored and that refunds are in the works for unused portions of purchased Bid Packs.

“Thanks to our amazing hotel partners who were open to trying something new and innovative and for helping us understand how we could better provide value to you,” the Off & Away team says on its website.

“Thanks to our customers. You all rock. Keep dreaming and keep traveling.”

Off & Away had been featured in a TLabs Showcase in June 2010.

“The travel distribution landscape is constantly changing, but our partnership with United remains strong,” says Greg Schulze, Expedia’s senior vice president of global tour and transport. “We are pleased to work strategically with United to extend its full range of products to millions of travelers.”

There were no details about the move to further distribute the airline’s “full range of products,” but it likely refers to getting some of United’s ancillary products, such as United Economy Plus, onto Expedia.com.

The deal also marks a win of sorts for the Expedia Affiliate Network. United will continue to offer EAN’s nearly 145,000 hotels to visitors to United.com, the companies say. Officially, Travelscape, an Expedia brand, is the current provider for United Hotels.

Competition among US-based online travel agencies for private label or cobranded deals has been heating up, and Expedia managed to hang onto its United agreement for hotels.

The company claims that this new extranet, in the form of a mobile-accessible Web app, is “the first product of its kind.”

Revenue managers, working for HotelTonight partners, can use the app’s close-out button to clear inventory they no longer want to offer, and change room inventory in four taps, HotelTonight says.

In addition, revenue managers can change pricing in five taps, the company says.

These functions can be managed from one screen on their iPhones, Android devices or Blackberrys and changes take effect “instantly,” HotelTonight states.

HotelTonight’s consumer apps for iOS and Android offer a handful of hotels in 28 cities, and they can be booked starting that night only.

The company launched its consumer services as an iPhone app late last year and until now offered hotels a traditional extranet, which wasn’t optimized for mobile, says Sam Shank, HotelTonight’s co-founder and CEO.

HotelTonight introduced an Android app for consumers several months ago.

In theory, revenue managers using the mobile extranet now can oversee their HotelTonight inventory and rate choices from an aircraft, while being driven to an appointment or from a restaurant using mobile browsers — anywhere on the go — instead of having to wait to get to a laptop or desktop computer.

The revamped service is part of a Euros 2 million investment programme to relaunch the travel vertical with hotels unveiled in July.

The company has already made some tweaks to the hotels service including maps and, says boss Chris Nixon, seen significant conversion as a result.

The team has also been working on localising its France and Italy versions of the hotels service which will make localisation of the flights much quicker although the UK service will be first.

Car hire is also in the pipeline and Nixon is currently considering the best route to bring package holidays onto the service.

He said a phone number based service was one potential option rather than a pure online play and the UK approach would be different to other countries.

“We might look at a white label initially in the UK.”

Nixon anticipates Kelkoo Travel will fully emerge from beta before the end of the year but says there are plans to cull some elements where the user-experience is not good.

Marketing plans will kick off next year including email CRM and Nixon says the company is still considering TV advertising.

“Until we get the site up and live with some traffic it’s difficult to see which channel is the best and in what country.”

Kayak confirms Expedia’s EAN and Travelocity’s WCT now are both providing hotel data for Book Kayak in the US, and EAN is a provider for Kayak in some international domains, as well, although Kayak declines to provide further details.

Outside the US, Kayak has websites in 14 other countries, including the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Austria.

Hotel-data providers vary by country, Kayak says.

With Book Kayak, instead of solely transferring consumers to a third-party online travel agency or hotel site for bookings as metasearch sites traditionally do, Kayak now uses the two private label services to process the hotel bookings on Kayak.com

Currently on Kayak.com, when the Book Kayak option appears in hotel search results, there is no option to book on Expedia.com as one of the other site options.

Conversely, when there is no Book Kayak option in search results on Kayak.com, Expedia.com often appears as one of the booking options.

Kayak UK also offers a Book Kayak option, but Expedia results appear alongside the Book Kayak option, which suggests that perhaps EAN is not yet providing data for the Book Kayak option in the UK or some other dynamic is at play.

Kayak declines to comment on the display logic it uses.

Kayak’s decision to add providers to its Book Kayak service can’t be great news for Travelocity, which was the launch provider for the service, or for Orbitz, which argues it has an exclusive online travel agency contract with Kayak for flights and hotels in the US.

Kayak interprets its contract with Orbitz differently, and Orbitz and Kayak are currently arbitrating their dispute.

Chris Chiames, an Orbitz spokesman, declined to comment on Kayak’s other relationships, but adds “we are in regular discussions about new and better ways to work together.”

The TUI-owned company declined to give actual figures but says it plans to increase investment in technology over the period by 43%.

Accommodation and destinations sector boss Joan Vila describes the investment as ‘a significant amount’ and says the company sold 14 million room nights in the year ended 30 September 2011, a 25% increase on 2010.

Funds will be devoted to maintaining the speed of the system which at peak times during the year has to deal with more than 26,000 bookings a day.

B2B division strategy and IT boss Paul Anthony says the company is also considering cloud technology as it scales up its operation further and expands in new as well as existing source markets.

Mobile is another area for investment in terms of driving the business forward and hotelbeds is looking to ensure its accommodation and other destination product is deliverable to airline and agent customers offering mobile to consumers.

Anthony says hotelbeds’ customers, which include KLM and easyJet, are also looking for the product to be segmented in different ways and delivered over various platforms including white label solutions and XML.

Vila also says the company is unlikely to be touched by consolidation in the bedbank sector because it already has scale and plans to grow organically.

“It’s easier to grow organically than have the pain of an acquisition. We don’t see the need, there is not a segment we are not supplying.”

He adds that the bedbank sector does not have the ‘same levels of risk’ of other businesses in the travel industry.

The five-year growth plan also includes plans to increase the headcount by 1,000 with up to 60 new roles in IT including system architects and HTML5 developers.

The company has added green elements to its existing Optima property management technology enabling hotels to offer express check-in online or via mobile and express check-out via iPad and other tablet devices.

Further initiatives within the Optima Go Green solution include a process to scan passports or other ID documents, a daily snapshot to be sent to hotel managers and owners electronically and a mobile element allowing managers and sales people to view price and availability information online via smartphones.

A number of hotels have taken steps to go paperless in recent years including the introduction of iPad apps and electronic guides to replace guest directories as well as online guest feedback questionnaires.

That’s the thrust of a GuestCentric study of mobile booking patterns in 300 boutique hotels over a three-month period. Among the findings:

• 60% of mobile consumers are looking for hotel reservations tonight or tomorrow night;

• 90% of mobile bookings take in some of the next six nights (i.e. tonight, tomorrow night or the following four nights);

• 90% of mobile consumers book one to three nights; and

• 95% of mobile consumers book one room.

The survey results back a GuestCentric product launch for its QuickBook Mobile booking engine.

Hotels using QuickBook Mobile offer travelers a mobile-optimized shopping and booking experience, featuring an interactive calendar with rates and availability for tonight, tomorrow night and the next four nights.

Here’s  what the QuickBook Mobile calendar looks like for Liss Ard Estate’s implementation in Skibbereen, Ireland:

GuestCentric says its QuickBook Mobile platform utilizes HTML5 and CSS3 “to provide a fast, interactive experience to consumers.”

Travelers looking for hotel rooms beyond six days ahead can perform more traditional availability checks using the mobile solution, as well, GuestCentric says.

Other properties implementing QuickBook Mobile include Hotel Aiken in South Carolina; Glassdrumman Lodge in Irleand,  and Chiado 16 in Portugal.

GuestCentric’s research about mobile bookings coincides with studies by others confirming a preference for last-minute bookings on mobile devices.

In 2010, for instance, Priceline indicated that many hotel bookings using its Hotel & Car Negotiator apps tend to occur after the traveler has arrived at the destination.

There’s been a lot of recent focus on hotel bookings tonight, too.

Priceline recently debuted Tonight-Only Deals for same-day hotel bookings on its iPhone and iPad apps.

And, Hotel Tonight unveiled hotel reservations starting tonight-only in an iPhone app in late 2010. Hotel Tonight subsequently introduced an Android app, as well.

New York-based Open Hospitality and its staff of 35 provide hotels with website design, online marketing, search engine optimization, mobile website development and social media services, and will operate as a division of Pegasus.

David Millili remains CEO of Open Hospitality and becomes chief web officer of Pegasus Solutions. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The acquisition positions Pegasus as a vertically integrated company, offering a more complete set of solutions to the hotel industry. Pegasus is known for is RezView NG central reservations system and electronic distribution services.

“We could see that we were missing an ingredient and now we’ve completed the recipe,” says Mike Kistner, CEO of Pegasus Solutions, referring to Open Hospitality. “It was too good an opportunity to pass up.”

Adding a Web-marketing component to the portfolio is consistent with industry trends. Sabre Hospitality, too, for example, offers distribution and e-marketing services to the hotel industry.

Millili of Open Hospitality says the move will enable hotels to boost their visibility and reservations prowess, and will allow Open Hospitality to expand internationally.

Pegasus Solutions and Open Hospitality have been partners for about five years, and the acquisition enables them to approach independent, group and chain hotels with a more complete solution.

Kistner says the acquisition also enables Dallas-based Pegasus to establish a “beachhead” in New York to expand the company’s presence there.

The hotels and holidays flash deals service, which has not put a number on its funding so far, says it is planning a £5 million marketing campaign in 2012 to establish itself as the market leader in the space.

The company will face stiff competition from an already crowded market place including LivingSocial which extended its Escapes travel service into Europe in August.

Secret Escapes says it already has 750,000 active members and is doubling turnover every three months.

Former dealchecker boss Alex Saint, a co-founder of Secret Escapes, has now taken the helm at the company.

Saint stayed on with dealchecker after its acquisition by EasyVoyage in February to ensure a smooth handover.

Secret Escapes already has partnerships with Teletext Holidays and Planet Confidential with a further two in the pipeline including a major newspaper group and a private sales e-commerce site.

Tom Valentine, managing director of Secret Escapes said the model ‘taps into the current mood’ from consumers who want luxury experiences but also want a good deal.

For three-quarters of respondents location was important while almost two-thirds said the attractive appearance of a property was important.

Online reviews were also an influencing factor for 57% of consumers.

The report demonstrates the huge impact online has had on hotels with only about one in 10 consumers booking accommodation through a travel agent.

The overwhelming majority, 86%, are doing it themselves on the web and more than half are using price comparison sites.

InvisibleHand integrated car rental into its search widget last month and said there were plans to include major travel sites next.